Monday, November 25, 2019

How much dumber are big families?

We know that dumb people tend to have larger families, so I was curious about how much IQ drops with each additional child. Here's the mean IQ by family size (sample size = 26,388, immigrants excluded):

Mean offspring IQ by number of children

1    101.4
2    101.2
3    100.2
4      98.4
5      97.1
6      95.2
7      94.2
8      93.0
9      91.7
10    90.8
11    89.6
12+  88.8

If we do an OLS regression, we see that for each additional child, the predicted drop in IQ is 1.13 points. This doesn't mean, of course, that having more kids causes IQs to fall. It simply means that the dumber the couple, the bigger the number of children. As shown in the movie "Idiocracy," smart people see every reason to delay having kids, while the dull ones do what comes naturally.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Do high-income men marry younger wives? What about men with a history of many sex partners?

Evolutionary theory claims that men value physically attractive partners while women desire partners with high status. Normally, we think of status in terms of income, but we can divide men in terms of their sexual success with women. Physical attractiveness is correlated with youth, so I calculated the age difference for married couples. The following is the average number of years that the husband is older than the wife (General Social Survey, sample size = 338):

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by husband's income

Low-income      2.93
Middle-income  2.23
High-income     1.66

This is the opposite of what we predicted: the age gap is smallest for the high-income. Evidently, wealthy men and their wives are more egalitarian, while poor couples are more traditional.

And by number of sex partners since age 18?

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by sex partners since 18

0-3       1.81
4-6       2.86
7-9       2.08
10-19   2.48
20+      4.54

The mean bounces around for the lower numbers, but the men with 20 or more sexual partners have the youngest wives by far.

Sexually successful men seem to be trading their appeal for more youthful wives, but this does not seem to be the case for men with lots of money.

Friday, November 22, 2019

How often are the highly intelligent found among the poorest people?

In the last post, it was mentioned that high IQ people are VERY diverse in terms of income. Many are not particularly interested in pursuing lots of money. But let's look at the other end: Few people would want to be poor, so does IQ keep one out of poverty?

Using General Social Survey data, I looked to see how many people in the highest IQ category (125+) are found in the lowest 10% of income earners (sample size = 16,626). For men, it's 3.4%. So smart guys have a low rate of poverty, but not all escape it. I imagine these men have serious physical or mental health issues.

For smart women, it's 8.0%. Their rate is lower than average, but not by that much. In addition to the health issues that men might face, some intelligent woman are likely to be stay-at-home moms who don't earn much.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Does IQ do a better job of predicting income among younger or older adults?

We know that IQ only has a moderate correlation with income, and it looks like much of this is due to the fact that intelligent people are very diverse in terms of earnings: some are super rich but many aren't very interested in money and pursue other things. I, for example, don't make more than my dad who was a maintenance man and belonged to a union. I could have pursued high-paying business jobs like my brothers, but I was drawn to academics (unfortunately!).

But does the correlation vary with age? Perhaps the earning capacity that comes with IQ becomes more and more evident with the accumulation of years.

Using General Social Survey data, I calculated Pearson correlations between IQ and personal income. Here are the correlations by age group and gender:

Correlation between IQ and income

Men
Ages  18-24  -.03
          25-34   .14
          35-44   .20
          45-54   .26
          55-64   .27

Smart men ages 18 to 24 actually make slightly less than their less intelligent counterparts. Smarter guys are more likely to be in college and thus not earning much money. But we can see the correlation grows with older age groups, and it peaks only in the decade before retirement age.

Women
Ages  18-24   .03
          25-34   .20
          35-44   .20
          45-54   .22
          55-64   .24

We see the same basic trend with women.

These findings are consistent with individual difference research in general: Traits matter more over the long-term and less in any particular situation.

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Who's more likely to sex and labor traffic--Americans or immigrants?

Recently, I posted on which races are most likely to engage in sex trafficking.  What about immigrants? Compared to Americans, are they more likely to be criminals of this type?

They sure are. Immigrants are 14% of people living in America, but they are 33% of convicted sex traffickers. That's three times the rate of native-borns. Even more striking, immigrants are 69% of those who enslave workers. That's almost 14 times the rate of Americans.

Sex and labor trafficking: work that Americans are unwilling to do.




Tuesday, November 12, 2019

What kind of people think that having kids increases one's social standing?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked American adults if they agreed with the following: "Having children increases people's social standing in society." Answers ranged from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." The answers looked like this (sample size = 1,248):

Percent distribution

Strongly Agree  3.7
Agree  29.4
Neither  30.5
Disagree  31.3
Strongly Disagree  5.0

Answers are pretty normally distributed. People simply disagree on this issue.

I looked at a list of variables to see what predicted agreement--age, sex, race, city size, South v. North, income, education, IQ, church attendance, and political orientation.

The only three variables that matter are sex, income, and education: 39.6% of men agree or strongly agree that children increase one's social standing compared to only 27.7% of women. Perhaps women are more likely to see kids as obstacles to status since conventional status comes from education and work; activities that, for women anyway, conflict with raising children.

43.2% of people who dropped out of school agree or strongly agree that children give status, while only 31.8% of people with advanced educations feel the same.

Income is similar: 34.7% of low-income but only 25.2% of high-income people agree or strongly agree with the statement.

Since there is some tension between energy devoted to kids versus education and work, it looks like people who have earned lots of education and income status tend to devalue children, while the opposite is true for people with little conventional status.

I once discussed this issue with my physician brother-in-law. I told him that the most accomplished people are having the fewest children and that he and I were exceptions with our large families. I added that in an evolutionary sense, all these successful people were losers but didn't realize they were losers. My brother-in-law then responded, "That's right. We've got them right where we want them."

Thursday, November 07, 2019

Police officers of which race are most likely to use deadly force?

The Media constantly do stories of white officers who seem trigger happy, especially if the suspect is black. Is such a portrayal accurate?

No. This study analyzes data on 291 officers involved in 106 shootings in New York City. Shooting officers were compared to non-shooting officers at the same scene. The authors found that black officers were 3.1 times more likely to shoot suspects than officers of other races. That's a big difference.

New research has reported that officers with high scores on impulsivity are quicker to pull the trigger than highly-controlled officers. Impulsivity is a major cause of criminality, too, and has been used to explain the black/non-black gap in crime.

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

"Do the Right Thing" 30 Years Later

I avoid angry black movies because they're so boring. The recent "Blackkklansman" by Spike Lee was unbearable.

That was not always the case. When I was in college, I went to see "Do The Right Thing" and was sympathetic. I felt the same when I watched the LA Riots and "Malcolm X" three years later.

Since that time I got a real education on racial issues, but I wondered how I would react to seeing "Do The Right Thing" after 30 years.

It struck me as a fairly realistic portrayal of a black urban neighborhood minus its menace and criminality. (I lived in Brooklyn in the mid-80s and wouldn't be caught dead in a poor black neighborhood.)

The only black person working is Spike Lee's character--the protagonist--and he must be the slowest pizza delivery guy in the history of the world. The guy has no real plans and doesn't support his girlfriend (Rosie Perez) and son much.

Nobody seems to be employed (okay, Lee's sister works), but everyone is good at bitching about whatever, and people talk and talk as if they're going to accomplish something.

Sal, played well by Danny Aiello, is an Italian who owns and runs a pizzeria in the middle of the black neighborhood. He and the Korean shop owners across the street are the only industrious people around.

The martyr of the story, a young black man who gets accidentally killed by the police, is a narcissist who ticks off much of the neighborhood by constantly blasting Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" from his boom box.

How does the neighborhood respond to excessive use of force by the police? Do they organize in order to get police reforms? Do they donate money so the young man's family can sue the police department and the city?  Do they teach their youngsters to comply with police demands, and if they're mistreated to file a complaint at the department?  No, Lee knows his people. They burn down the best restaurant in the neighborhood.

But then we have the true race realism moment:


What a great scene. Sometimes Leftist movies accidentally spill the truth.


P.S. Some might see Lee's movie as prescient since it focuses on police violence. It is better described as influential. The elite college students from my generation absorbed a vision of the world held by people like Spike Lee, and they now run organizations like the New York Times. The police have been killing blacks for a very long time, but only now it's The End of the World.

Sunday, November 03, 2019

Are kids with gay parents more likely to turn out gay?

During the gay marriage debates, the claim was frequently made that children from gay families are not more likely than others to develop a same-sex orientation.

I was always skeptical of the claim because: 1) gay parents should at least make kids feel more comfortable about going with a gay identity; and 2) if the kids were biological offspring, they would probably face a higher risk of homosexual orientation via genes from a parent. In addition, I didn't rule out the possibility that gay parents might provide a more permissive environment for kids so they are more likely to have pleasant same-sex experiences when they are young and impressionable.

This new study shows that the claim about gay families was false. 76 adult biological offspring of a woman with a lesbian partner were matched demographically with 76 controls. Women from these families were: 1.5 times to be sexually attracted to other women; 2.4 times more likely to identify as lesbian or bisexual; and 1.4 times as likely to have same-sex experiences.

Compared to controls, men from lesbian families were: 3.1 times more likely to be sexually attracted to men; 4.3 times more likely to identify as gay or bisexual; and 3.8 times more likely to have had same-sex experiences.

There is no evidence here that lesbian parents have more impact on girls than boys, either by passing on genes that raise the risk of same-sex attractions for daughters but not sons, or by gender-specific socializing. In fact, the parent-child link seems to be stronger for males. (This could be due to the very high rates of same-sex attraction, identification, and experiences among the female controls. How do I make sense of this? I suspect women in their 20s in the past decade have lived in a pro-lesbianism culture which makes their numbers not that dissimilar from female peers from lesbian families.)

My guess would be that moms are passing on mutations on to sons and daughters that tend to disrupt heterosexual brain development.  I suppose an encouraging environment could convince someone with same-sex attractions to pursue and embrace the identity, but I doubt this would explain such large differences. And I doubt that lesbians are providing a perinatal environment that raises the risk of the kind of infection posited by gay germ theory.

UPDATE: tantum (@QuasLacrimas) over at Twitter made a good point that these results do not support sexually antagonistic selection. According to the theory, genes that make a daughter more feminine and attractive and thus more reproductively successful will raise the risk that a son will develop a homosexual orientation. The daughter's success compensates for the son's reproductive failure so the genes are not weeded out. The logic is the same for lesbianism, with the advantage/disadvantage reversed.

Such a theory would predict that lesbians would be likely to have masculine, straight boys, but this study found that lesbians are much more likely to have gay sons. 

Saturday, November 02, 2019

Members of which race are most likely to be victims of inter-racial violence?

What are the patterns of inter-racial violence?

This report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics is an analysis of 2012-15 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data based on hundreds of thousands of American households. Victims of any kind of violence (assault/battery, robbery, rape) are asked about the specifics of the crimes committed, including the race and Hispanic status of offenders. Of course, we don't have data on homicides since "dead men tell no tales."

Adjusting for group size, I calculated the ratio of black-on-white crimes versus white-on-black crimes. Blacks are 6.3 times more likely to attack whites than the reverse.

Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely to commit some kind of violence against whites than whites against Hispanics.

Finally, blacks are 4.8 times more likely to assault Hispanics than vice-versa.

Elites always portray whites as the victimizers, but when it comes to rape, robbery, and assault (and murder which shows the same patterns) whites are most likely to be the victims, and blacks the perpetrators.

UPDATE: Looking at the numbers, what drives the large black-white difference is that despite the large numbers of whites in the population, their share of all black victimizers is small. Whites rarely attack non-whites. Their violence is confined mostly to other whites. 


Are gun owners mentally ill?

  Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...